Volume 15, Number 1

The Whole Question of Metaphysics

On February 11-16, 1993,
the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
met in Boston for its 159th National Meeting. While several sessions
addressed topics of great interest, one in particular -- "The
New Anti-evolutionism" -- focused on issues which have long
been featured in OR publications and correspondence.1
This report concentrates on that section.

The Case of the Missing Speaker

Michael Ruse, a philosopher and biology historian at the University
of Guelph in Ontario, was probably the best-known speaker featured
at the session, "The New Anti-evolutionism." As session
organizer Eugenie Scott remarked before Ruse spoke, "He is
almost a person who needs no introduction in this context."
Yet a recent article describing the session in the London Times
Higher Education Supplement omits Ruse entirely.2 Although the Times provides
the identities and views of all the other speakers in some detail,
they make no mention--even in passing--of Ruse nor his talk.

Why the glaring omission? Was Ruse's talk so commonplace or
forgettable that it warranted no mention? Hardly: indeed, the
opposite is the case. Ruse is often controversial, but he is rarely
boring, and his talk entitled "Nonliteralist anti-evolution
as in the case of Phillip Johnson" was true to form; it was
(for this correspondent) easily the most memorable and surprising
of the meeting. Thus I speculate that Ruse's conspicuous absence
from the Times article may be due to a certain uneasiness
about his main point, which, Ruse argued (and I agree) "is
an important one."

This eyewitness report may help to repair the Times
complete neglect of Professor Ruse. Let's begin by reviewing the
other speakers' remarks.

Eugenie Scott: Introductory Comments

Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for
Science Education (NCSE), opened the session with some familiar
themes. She noted that, while the courts have consistently rejected
teaching creationism, the general position still retains "surprising
strength" at the local level. Creationists have simply modified
their arguments--"hunkering down"-- to avoid First Ammendment
challenges. By employing terms such as "intelligent design"
or "abrupt appearance," Scott argued, creationists hope
to avoid the constitutional obstacles that seem invariably to
spring up around what Scott calls "the 'C' word," namely,
creation. But scientists and educators should not be deceived.
"The proximate cause" of notions such as intelligent
design remains "the increased activity of the religious right."

Next William Thwaites, a geneticist at San Diego State University
and a well-known creation/evolution writer, presented a freewheeling
critique of Wendell Bird's concept of "abrupt appearance"
outlined in The Origin of Species Revisited. Thwaites began
by popping up from behind the lectern to laughter from the audience.
"That's about the extent of abrupt appearance as far as its
scientific value," he quipped. After summarizing the poor
knowledge of evolutionary theory exhibited by first-year students
at San Diego State (one wonders what they know about any biological
theory, much less evolution) and telling a joke about the difficulty
of teaching "intelligent design" without becoming entangled
in theology, Thwaites came at last to Bird's theory of "abrupt
appearance." Calling this concept "a thinly veiled attempt
to disguise scientific creationism," Thwaites accused Bird
of employing "a hilarious quote" from Michael Denton's
book Evolution, A Theory in Crisis. The passage regarding
the difficulty of assessing evolutinary relationships strictly
from fossilized skeletal or hard tissues turns out, Thwaites claimed,
to be "a mixed-up quote from Henry Morris" who had "painted
himself into a corner" with a similar argument in the book
Scientific Creationism. According to Thwaites, Bird simply
"amplifies ...a little bit more" on Denton--who was,
in turn, quoting Morris.3

After examining the sources in question I could find no evidence
for thwaites's claim. Denton cites not Henry Morris but the paleontological
literature, where the problem of inferring the details of soft
tissues from fossilized hard parts (and inferring fossil relationships
more generally) is well known.4
In fact, there are no references to Henry Morris anywhere in Evolution,
A Theory in Crisis. Thwaites's claim was groundless.

Thwaites made an equally groundless claim made moments later.
Bird, he contended, "is talking about abrupt appearance in
a 10,000-year context," wheras the authors Bird cites have
a much longer, 4.6-billion-year context in mind. In fact, early
in his book Bird takes pains to emphasize that "the theory
of abrupt appearance does not rquire any particular time frame."5 Not surprisingly,
therefore, one will not find a defense in the Origin of Species
Revisited of a young earth, nor of any particular cosmological
time scale.

Thinking that perhaps Thwaites was privy to other information,
I called him and said that I could not substantiate his claims.
After some discussion Thwaites acknowledged that both satements
were errors. On the Bird/Denton/Morris matter he said he had assumed
that Denton was quoting Morris but did not check to see whether
this was the case. Regarding Bird's alleged defense of a young
earth, Thwaites said he had imputed the 10,000-year figure to
Bird on the basis of Bird's longstanding association with the
Institute for Creation Research (ICR).

The reader should weigh Thwates's explanation for his statements,
since much of what he said in his AAAS talk was false.

Kenneth Miller: "Evolution and the Argument from Design"

Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University and
editor of the Journal of Cell Science, has debated Henry Morris
and contributed to the creation/evolution literature. He responded
from an evolutionary perspective to classical and more recent
formulations of the argument from design. Although the design
argument is easily stated and emotionally appealing, it is, Miller
contended, badly flawed. The problem is not with the premise that
organisms are fantastically complex objects. "Nature is a
lot more intricate and a lot more complex," said Miller,
"than anything yet fashioned by the mind or the hand of man."
Rather, the argument assumes that evolutionary theory explains
the origin of complex organisms solely "by mechanisms of
chance," and chance alone, of course, could produce nothing.
While this assumption is correct, Miller noted, it is not what
evolutionary theory teaches. He argued that the "most misunderstood"
statement about evolution "is that evolution is driven by
random chance." Mutations are generally unpredicatable and
thus appear random, "but the net result" when sifted
by selection "is not random."

Furthermore, biological structures are built by selection incrementally,
not all at once. And this, Miller urged, "introduces a rather
interesting artifact," namely, the frequent imperfection
of adaptations. If natural selection, but not an intelligent designer,
created organisms, we should observe "organs and systems
...that have obvious flaws, mistakes, and redundancies" as
holdovers from earlier, different functions of the organ or system.
Miller illustrates this point with several examples: the "backwards"
retina of the human eye (with its photoreceptors facing the "wrong
way round"), the "yolk sac" in mammals, human pseudogenes
and the apparent expression of quiescent genes for teeth in chickens.
These structures, Miller concluded, refute intelligent design.
They are not what "a competent designer would produce, starting
from scratch with a blank sheet of paper." Evolution, however--"the
master tinkerer"--explains them "perfectly."

Miller spoke with verve, and his talk was well-illustrated.
Moreover, he raised significant challenges for the theory of intelligent
design. Why, to take one of his examples, would an intelligent
designer build a retina with photoreceptors facing away from the
incoming light? Note that I have not said facing "the wrong
way"--for, of course, that remains to be established. Despite
Miller's assertion (repeated during the question period in response
to my persistent queries) that the human retina is suboptimal,
it is far from obvious that a retina with forward-facing receptors
would be optimal. Indeed, objectively determining optimality itself
in this or other situations is far from obvious. Theorists employing
optimality theory in evolution know that determining optima is
difficult--yet few realize how the added theological (or intentional)
dimension entailed by intelligent design vastly magnifies the
problem.6

More troubling was Miller's rather too sanguine attitude towards
the theory of natural selection. Since the time of Darwin, many
evolutionists have lived unhappily with the theory, perceiving
that the real business of evolution is logically and empirically
prior to the process of selection. In his book Natural Selection
in the Wild John Endler notes:

Natural selection cannot explain the origin of new variants
and adaptations, only their spread.7

The fundamental mechanisms of evolution are the molecular
mechanisms leading to new genetic variants, the expression of
those variants through the genetic and developmental systems,
and constraints to the appearance and function of those variants.
Natural selection and genetic drift are mechanisms that cause
only frequency changes in populations.8

Miller may well agree with this, yet nothing in his talk revealed
any misgivings about the creative sufficiency of selection. Indeed,
he argued that "the notion that natural selection can produce
a complex structure is well supported." Yet this statement
wants--in the eyes of many of his evolutionary colleagues--far
more evidence than he provided.

Jonathon Marks and Laurie Godfrey: "Non-Darwinism and
Anti-Darwinism"

Jonathon Marks of the Yale Anthropology Department stood next
to the podium; his co-author, Laurie Godfrey of the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst Anthropology Department, sat in the
audience. Unlike the preceeding speakers, who were occupied almost
entirely with criticizing creationists, these biologists turned
their artillery on errant evolutionists--but not, to be sure,
out of any sympathy for creationism. "There is plenty of
blame to be spread around for the popularity of anti-evolutionism,"
Marks said, "and some of it can be laid at the feet of the
scientific community itself." The figure of Darwin, Marks
began, has become an icon, which "evolutionary biologists
feel obliged to invoke"--or repudiate. The adjective "Darwinian"
and the noun "Darwinism" are standard markers of orthodoxy,
against which many biologists contrast their novel views of evolution.
Marks contended that this practice plays into the hands of creationists,
for whom all evolutionists are "Darwinists" and who
regard rejecting real or supposed Darwinian tenets as tantamount
to rejecting evolution itself.

But the richest succor unwittingly given to creationists, Marks
continued, comes from "those biologists who promote social
theories, using Darwinism to validate them." As examples
he cited the social Darwinism of the late nineteeth century, the
twentieth century's eugenics movement and, most recently, sociobiology.
These views, tied to evolution through the "use of rhetorical
tricks by zealots for particular programs," only serve to
make the theory "unpalatable" for much of the American
public. "It can hardly be bewildering," Marks observed,
"that many Americans reject evolution when you stop and ponder
what is being said in its name." No less bothersome is the
"idiosyncratic social philosophy" of hereditarianism
or "the primacy of the genes in human affairs."

Genetic comparisons between humans and other primates are misleading,
Marks warned, if other biological information is ignored. "If
the overall biology of the animals tells you that they are very
different, and the genetics tells you that they are nearly identical,
it follows that the genetic comparison is telling you something
relatively trivial about the overall biology." Placing one's
evolutionary eggs in the basket of hereditarianism is therefore
to credit a "perverse variant of Darwinism." Evolutionists
would do well, Marks concluded, to think "clearly or critically
about evolutionary biology and what is being presented in its
name."

Marks and Godfrey argue that "idiosyncratic Darwinian
ideas" should be identified as such, and rejected as culturally
or socially motivated accretions on the otherwise sound edifice
of evolutionary theory. They claim this will help restore "the
good name of Darwin and evolution." But as Phillip Johnson
has argued in Darwin on Trial, if the foundation of evolution
is the philosophy of naturalism, then--at least for many theists--no
amount of buffing or scraping will remove the offending doctrine.
Naturalism undergirds the Darwinian outlook at every point.9

That naturalism might offend theists is not hard to see. Although
Marks and Godfrey decry hereditariansim, they would (I think)
surely argue that phenomena such as religious beliefs or practices
are ultimately the consequences of evolution, and hence, wholly
natural in their origins. "Humans, after all, are idea machines,"
said Marks in the talk. "That's what we evolved for."
The evolutionary picture shows that 20 million years ago, no organisms
believed in the existence of "God." Today some organisms
do believe in such an entity. How did this idea "God"
come to be, and to what does it refer? The standard Darwinian
account explains the origin of theological ideas from the "bottom
up," by appealing to various natural causes. Howard Gruber,
author of Darwin on Man, writes:

Darwin's treatment of the origins of religious belief was
...entirely naturalistic. He likens primitive interest in the
inexplicable to a dog's disturbance at some unfamiliar event;
he assumes that sophisticated human theologies evolve from a
general belief in "spiritual agencies" to account for
inexplicable events; he repeatedly emphasizes the continuity
of human religious beliefs with tendencies to be found in other
animals, citing one author who claimed that "a dog looks
on his master as on a god."10

Other concepts central to Christianity and Judaism, such as
revelation or sin, simply find no groundings (on their own terms)
within the naturalistic ontology of orthodox Darwinism. On the
standard evolutionary account each will turn out to be really
something else--that is, something natural. Thus, for theists,
debates about the merits of this or that putatively Darwinian
tenet are finally insignificant. For those standing outside the
naturalistic paradigm, the reality of spiritual experience cannot
be cashed out in naturalistic terms.11

They contend that they want a philosophical reformation going
to the very foundations of evolution. If naturalism is abandoned,
however, there are good reasons to think a theory not at all
resembling evolution would do a vastly better job of explaining
the origin of living things. In a strong sense, therefore, the
truth or falsity of naturalism is the whole game. However salutary
Marks and Godfrey's exhortations to right thinking, evolution
is in trouble with many theists for different and deeper reasons.

Michael Ruse, the next speaker, focused on naturalism as his
theme. But if the reader will allow me to tinker with the order
of the speakers, I shall treat Ruse last and examine Howard Van
Till's remarks next.

Howard Van Till: "Anti-Evolution as a Reaction to Scientism"

Howard Van Till of Calvin College's Physics Department and
author of The Fourth Day and Science Held Hostage
(with two co-authors) also explained anti-evolution's popularity.
He began by expressing his unhappiness with the term "anti-evolutionism,"
which seemed to him ambiguous. "Anti-evolution," his
preferred term for opposing evolution, should be distinguished,
he said, from the position of "anti-evolutionism."
Evolutionism can be regarded as a contradiction of "evolutionary
naturalism," a view which "excludes God as a reality."
Plainly, unlike the theory of evolution narrowly conceived, Van
Till said, all theists oppose evolutionism.

What motivates anti-evolution? In both its old and new varieties,
Van Till argued, it does not spring from "a disciplined and
informed scientific judgment of evidence" because "the
most vocal critics" of evolution are not trained in science
but in other fields. "Hence, my judgment is that factors
other than scientific theory evaluation per se are fueling
the resolve to discredit evolution." Anti-evolution, Van
Till continued, is in large measure a reaction to scientism,
"an epistemological stance that proceeds from a materialistic
world view," where "empirical science provides the only
means of obtaining knowledge of reality." Scientism, he said,
"continues to function as a remarkably powerful irritant."

Citing several recent examples of what he called "the
rhetoric of triumphalist scientism," Van Till argued that
anti-evolutionists have "bought the story" of scientism
and evolutionism, namely, that evolution refutes God's existence
or creative action. Seeing the "haystack" of atheistic
evolutionism as "inextricable from the barn of evolution,"
he said, anti-evolutionists have simply "razed the barn,"
harming science in the process.

Any irony pervades this debate, Van Till concluded. The same
flawed premise about God's creative role motivates both the forces
of scientism/evolutionism and their anti-evolution opponents.
The premise holds that unless God performs extraordinary, "irruptive"
creative acts to repair or overcome "built-in barriers and
deficiencies" in nature's economy, we have no evidence for
His existence. But natural economy without gaps, characterized
by "functional integrity," may equally be a created
one, Van Till argued (citing Basil and Augustine for theological
support). This view has been lost or forgotten in the polemics:
"Our progress seems impeded by our forgetfulness."

Van Till's stern rebuke of scientism and evolutionism is the
type of message the AAAS hears too frequently, and I commend him
for delivering it without equivocation. Yet the sharp boundary
he wants to establish between evolutionism, which he says all
theists oppose, and evolution, which he says is good science,
is an indistinct impression drawn in rapidly shifting sands. Like
it or not, evolution does bear on what Van Till elsewhere calls
"questions concerning transcendent relationships."12 Van Till
keeps the theory out of those areas by erecting an epistemological
fence as a boundary marker--a move that will, I think, strike
most evolutionists as quite arbitrary.

Consider again the question of human moral and religious behavior
origins. Our species has words for, and strongly proscribes, such
actions as wantonly killing other members of the species (murder),
having sexual relations by force (rape), harming animals for our
own amusement (cruelty), or saying particular names with particular
intentions (blasphemy).

Blasphemy? Now why should that be proscribed? One evolutionary
explanation might hold that the behavior "do not blaspheme"
is an exaptation, originally a directly selected behavior--such
as, say, allegiance to the alpha male--which in some hominid populations,
later evolved a "religious" significance.13 Other hominid populations, perhaps
under other selective pressures, lost or never acquired the behavior
"do not blaspheme." Thus, blasphemy is "wrong"
in some human populations, but not others (and so on).

Whether this particular explanation is correct or even plausible
is beside the point. On the received evolutionary view, we need
to explain the origin of our moral and religious behavior. If
we (thinking as evolutionists) hold, however, that they are not
phenomena to be explained--that they go beyond the competence
of evolutionary theory--then on what (non-question begging) epistemological
grounds have they been left out of the causal story?

As Van Till noted, his conventional construal of evolution
includes the common ancestry of all life and "the historical
modification of life forms." That chimpanzees (for instance)
exhibit one type of behavior, and humans another, is certainly
a "historical modification of life forms" and as such
should fall within the scientific purview of evolution. Since
their most recent common ancestor, chimpanzees and humans have
diverged behaviorally. Yet, presumably, when Van Till and nearly
any paleoanthropologist come to explain the origin of the behavior
"do not blaspheme," their scientific explanations
will differ markedly.

For Van Till, the Person whose name is being taken in vain
is unseen but nonetheless assuredly real. It is by God's revealed
command, and for no other reason or cause, that blasphemy is wrong--for
all (not some) human beings. Indeed, as a theological or transcendent
matter, Van Till would argue, there can be no properly scientific
(i.e., purely physical or material) explanation for the historical
formation of the behavior "do not blaspheme." Strictly
speaking, such an account would be a non sequitur.

For most evolutionists, however, science in general and evolutionary
theory in particular are not incompetent to explain human
behavioral evolution. Darwin's earliest notebooks recorded hypotheses
about the natural origins of moral and religious behavior.14 As Daniel
Dennett observes:

Darwin saw from the outset that his theory has to include
an entirely naturalistic account of the origins of the "mind"
and more particularly the "moral sense" of our species,
for if Man were to be the golden exception to Darwin's rule,
the whole theory would be dismissible.15

On the Darwinian view, questions such as the origins of morality
are difficult but still within the reach of empirical methods.
They are phenomena to be explained by science, in naturalistic
terms.

Thus, I would argue that Van Till, like the creationists he
criticizes, will come sooner or later to an impasses with the
scientific theory of evolution. Van Till takes that theory
to be a concept "whose scope is constrained by the categorically
limited competence of natural science." But unless evolutionists
assent to Van Till's epistemological fence--which places "transcendent"
questions such as the origins of religious behaviors, beyond the
competence of science--the naturalism-driven sands of evolution
cannot help but overtake and bury much of what Van Till now reserves
for theology.16

Michael Ruse: "Non-Literalist Anti-Evolution as in the
Case of Phillip Johnson"

For over a decade Michael Ruse has been a prominent figure
in the creation/evolution controversy. His philosophy of science
testimony at the 1981 Arkansas "Balanced Treatment"
trial influenced the late Judge William Overton's opinion in striking
down the law requiring teaching creation alongside evolution.
Among Ruse's many books, two (Darwinism Defended and But
Is It Science?) address the creation/evolution controversy
in detail, with Ruse strongly defending the orthodox Darwinian
viewpoint. Many articles on the subject have flowed from his word
processor. And Ruse has participated in numerous debates and symposia
taking up one aspect or another of the topic.

It was at one such symposium, held at Southern Methodist University
in March 1992, that Ruse met Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson.
Each knew something about the other, of course. They had corresponded
briefly, and Ruse had reviewed Johnson's book, Darwin on Trial
(although the review never appeared in print; Ruse was so critical
of the book, he said, that the editor assigning the review simply
dropped it). The symposium centered on arguments for, against,
or in some other way treating the proposition that:

Darwinism and neo-Darwinism as generally held and taught in
our society carry with them an a priori commitment to
metaphysical naturalism, which is essential to make a convincing
case on their behalf.

Ruse and Johnson were scheduled to debate a narrower topic--namely,
whether Darwinism can be reconciled with any meaningful form of
theistic religion. By all accounts, they got along well. "As
I always find when I meet creationists or non-evolutionists,"
Ruse said, "I find it a lot easier to hate them in print
than I do in person." The debate came to focus on the symposium
topic, which Ruse called "the whole question of metaphysics,"
and eventually waylaid his intended AAAS topic--a critique of
Johnson's book--leaving in its place "the whole question
of philosophical bases."

As Ruse describes it,

What Johnson was arguing was that, at a certain level, the
kind of position of a person like myself, an evolutionist, is
metaphysically based at some level, just as much as the kind
of position of ...some creationist, somone like Gish or somebody
like that. And to a certain extent, I must confess, in the 10
years since I performed or I appeared in the creationism trial
in Arkansas, I must say that I've been coming to this kind of
position myself.

It is now important, Ruse continued, that evolutionists admit--to
themselves, if not "in a court of law"--that "the
science side has certain metaphysical assumptions" which
ground its view of origins, and that future discussions must take
account of these assumptions. We cannot ignore them.

One problem is that the picture of science received from the
"logical positivists" or "people like Popper and
Hempel and Nagel" accords poorly with much historical evidence
concerning evolution's role. "It's certainly been the case,"
Ruse said, "that evolution has functioned, if not as a religion
as such, certainly with elements akin to a secular religion."
As examples, he cited "the most famous family in the history
of evolution, namely, the Huxleys," and, more recently, biologist
Edward O. Wilson. About Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's "bulldog,"
Ruse noted:

Certainly, if you read Thomas Henry Huxley, when he's in full
flight, there's no question but that for Huxley at some very
important level, evolution and science generally, but certainly
evolution in particular, is functioning a bit as a kind of secular
religion.

Julian Huxley, Thomas's grandson, also stood in this tradition.

For many evolutionists, Ruse continued, things are much the
same today: "Evolution in a way functions as a kind of secular
religion." In his book On Human Nature, well-known
Harvard systematist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson "is quite
categorical," he argued, "about wanting to see evolution
as the new myth, and all sorts of language like this. That for
him, at some level, it's functioning as a kind of metaphysical
system."

The practical consequence of these historical facts, Ruse said,
is that evolutionists should "look at evolution and science--in
particular, biology--generally philosophically I think a lot more
critically." Evolution emerges from or is grounded on certain
metaphysical commitments:

It seems to me very clear that at some very basic level, evolution
as a scientific theory makes a commitment to a kind of naturalism,
namely, that at some level one is going to exclude miracles and
these sorts of things, come what may.

This does not mean, Ruse quickly added, that evolution is "just
a religious assumption" or "irrational." One can
still justify the theory pragmatically, he said. "If certain
things do work, you keep going with this, and ...you don't change
in midstream." Ruse was not advising his listeners to jettison
their views. "I'm not coming here and saying give up evolution
or anything like that."

But he was counseling a measure of philosophical candor:

One should be sensitive to what I think history shows, namely,
that evolution just as much as religion--or at least, leave "just
as much," let me leave that phrase--evolution, akin to religion,
involves making certain a priori or metaphysical assumptions,
which at some level cannot be proven empirically. I guess we
all knew that, but I think that we're all much more sensitive
to these facts now. And I think that the way to deal with creationism,
but the way to deal with evolution also, is not to deny these
facts but to recognize them and to see where we can go, as we
move on from there.

The significance of Ruse's remarks (as he notes) does not lie
in their novelty. Consider the following, for instance, from evolutionary
geneticist Walter Fitch:

By a metaphysical construct I mean any unproved or unprovable
assumption that we all make and tend to take for granted. One
example is the doctrine of uniformitarianism that asserts that
the laws of nature ...have always been true in the past and will
always be true in the future. It is the belief in that doctrine
that permits scientists to demand repeatability in experiments.
I like the word doctrine in this case because it makes clear
that matters of faith are not restricted to creationists and
that in the intellectual struggle for citizen enlightenment we
need to be very clear just where the fundamental differences
between science and theology lie. It is not, as many scientists
would like to believe, in the absence of metaphysical underpinnings
in science.17

Indeed, despite his saying that he has been "coming to
this kind of position" over the past decade, Ruse himself
has long held the view that science is properly grounded on or
influnced by extra-scientific premises:

Call it what you like--"idealogy," "metaphysics,"
"philosophy"--there is a non-factual element in science
which reflects scientists' hopes and desires. Moreover, this
non-factual element is very important in the acceptability and
acceptance of a science.18

The significance of Ruse's talk lies in the changing context
of the creation/evolution debate. Since the early 1960s, in the
wake of the publication of The Genesis Flood and the Creation
Research Society's formation, most of the American debate concerning
the scientific status of creation has centered on the "young
earth" theory, with its concepts of apparent geological age,
a global flood, created kinds, and so on.

But many in the debate have come to relaize that the question
of the adequacy of young-earth creationism is really tangential
to the main issue: can science infer a creator? If the answer
to this question is "no," then it wouldn't really matter
what else one said on behalf of any creation model--such a theory
simply fails to qualify as a scientific explanation. On the other
hand, if the answer is "yes," then the philosophically
grounded objections to publishing creation hypotheses or teaching
creation as a scientific theory tumble like so many straw men
who have lost their supporting poles. The question then becomes
not whether creation can be science, but whether creation theory
best handles the evidence.

Thus, creation opponents have placed great weight on "in-principle"
philosophical arguments against the theory. One wants (to borrow
a military metaphor) an impregnable first line of defense: the
notion of creation is categorically not scientific. Try again--with
something naturalistic--if you want to be admitted to the arena
of rational discourse.

Ruse has thrown light on the arbitrary metaphysical commitment
in this argument, a point insisted upon by those who see the cultural
authority of neo-Darwinism as deriving not from the thoery's empirical
strength but from the deep preconception that science = naturalism.
Naturalism, as Ruse notes, is a position that can be taken--or
not. Naturalism is not forced on us by anything more basic.
Now Ruse would insist that "evolutionary theory in various
forms certainly seems to be the most reasonable position once
one has taken a naturalistic position." But what if one has
not taken a naturalistic position?

Suppose, indeed, that we take seriously the proposition that
the world and its creatures might have been created. It would
seem, then, that whatever philosophy of science we adopt, it must
allow for this possibility. We must be permitted, that is, to
employ historical inference methods that may generate the conclusion,
"this biological object probably came to be through the action
of an intelligence." Creationists are left to solve whether
such methods of inference can be made empirically fruitful or
robust. But the world of causal inquiry looks vastly different
when creation enters as a genuine empirical possibility. Naturalism
seen in that light looks not like a sound and necessary philosophical
basis for science but as a stutlifying dogma.

Endnotes

1. Among the sessions of interest
were "The End of Eve? Fossil Evidence from Africa,"
"What is Life? Origin and Evolution," "Biological
Science in the Public Domain, "Scientific Resources for a
Global Religious Myth," "The Religious Significance
of Big Bang Cosmology," "The Age and Scale of the Universe,"
"Oil and Water? Institutional Reactions Between Science and
Religion" and "The History and Philosophy of Cosmology."
Tapes of these and other sessions are available from Nationwide
Recording Service, 15385 S. 169 Highway, Olathe, KS 66062 (913-780-3307;
FAX 913-780-5091). return to text

3. As taken from the AAAS tape of
the session, Thwaites claim runs as follows: "There's a hilarious
quote from Michael Denton, who wrote Evolution, A Theory in
Crisis. And he's quite famous in creation circles because
he's supposedly non-religious. Which, when you read his book,
it turns out not to be the case. But nevertheless, there's a quote
in there that says that the soft parts of fossils are unreliable
as to indicating whether the--or, at least, I guess the hard parts
are unreliable--characteristically unreliable, to indicate as
to which class a given fossil might fall into. And so it makes
it look like the way you read the quote, as if from Denton, as
if we evolutionists have been guilty of relying on the soft parts,
or maybe just on the bones I can't remember which one it was--to
classify organisms, and this is unreliable. But it turns out this
is a mixed-up quote from Henry Morris, who wrote in Scientific
Creationism that--he kind of painted himself into a corner,
Morris did--when he said, yeah, a lot of these reptile to mammal
fossils look intermediate. OK, you know, they're sort of halfway
in between, and they kind of look like they destroy the whole
idea of scientific creation and lend support to evolution, but
that's only because we have just the bones, you see. And if we
had, if we only found a fossil that had all the soft parts in
it, we would know whether this was really a reptile or a mammal;
there would be no question about it. And then Denton took this
quote and said the bones are unreliable. And finally Wendell Bird
comes back and amplifies that a little bit more and makes it seem
like we've made a terrible goof in paleontology to rely on such
unreliable data." return to text

4. See, e.g., Colin Patterson, "Significance
of Fossils in Determining Evolutionary Relationships," Annual
Review of Ecology and Systematics 12 (1981):195-223. "The
information available from fossils," Patterson argues, "is
always vastly inferior to that in Recent organisms; the relationships
of fossils are therefore harder to test or specify. Since relationships
can best be assessed among Recent organisms, and since fossils
can be properly interpreted only after they have been assigned
to Recent monophyletic groups, the Recent biota must be the starting
point in work on relationships" (p. 209). In general, Patterson
notes, "the paucity of characters" in fossils "may
severely limit the precision with which relationships may be proposed
and tested" (p. 219). return to text

6. For an insightful critique of
optimality theory, see Richard Lewontin, "The Shape of Optimality,"
in The Latest on the Best, ed. John Dupre (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1987), pp. 151-59. My essay, "The Role of Theological
Arguments in Current Evolutionary Theory," forthcoming in
Proceedings of the Pascal Centre International Conference on
Science and Belief, ed. Jitse M. van der Meer, discusses the
problem of assessing the optimality of created objects. return
to text

9. For our purposes this definition
of naturalism should suffice: "A view of the world, and of
man's relation to it, in which only the operation of natural (as
opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces is admitted
or assumed" ("Naturalism," The Compact Edition
of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1971), p. 1899. It is hard to put much stock in the distinction
between methodological and metaphysical naturalism.
Scientific inquiry supposedly necessitates the former, whereas
the latter is held as a philosophical position transcending the
empirical. But the putatively more modest doctrine of methodological
naturalism excludes the possibility of creation and inference
to a creator, as surely as does its more thoroughgoing metaphysical
cousin. It is thus no less burdensome to those who think that
living things may have been created or designed. For all practical
or scientific purposes the adjectives "methodological"
and "metaphysical," when attached to "naturalism,"
set up a distinction without difference. return
to text

11. For many theists of my acquaintance,
naturalism is refuted first (and perhaps above all) by their own
spiritual experience. "Man is man," writes T.S. Eliot
in "Second Thoughts About Humanism," "because he
can recognize supernatural realities, not because he can invent
them. Either everything in man can be traced as a develpment from
below, or something must come from above. There is no avoiding
that dilemma: you must be either a naturalist or a supernaturalist"
(Selected Essays [London: Faber and Faber, 1951], p. 485).
return to text

13. "We suggest that such characters,
evolved for other usages (or for no function at all) and later
'coopted' for their current role, be called exaptations.
...They are all fit for their current role, hence aptus,
but they were not designed for it, and are therefore not ad
aptus, or pushed towards fitness. They owe their fitness to
features present for other reasons and are therefore fit (aptus)
by reason of (ex) their form, or ex aptus." (Stephen
Jay Gould and Elisabeth C. Vrba, "Exaptation--a missing term
in the science of form," Paleobiology 8[1982]: 6.
return to text

14. See Robert J. Richards, Darwin
and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.) return
to text

15. Daniel C. Dennett, Review of
Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and
Behavior, by Robert J. Richards, Philosophy of Science
56 (1989): 541. return to text

16. It is noteworthy that early
in their book Science on Trial, Van Till and his co-authors
lay the sciences of human behavior to one side, writing that "to
limit the scope of our discussion we choose not to consider the
social sciences or other disciplines concerned with human personal
behavior" (p. 11). But, of course, it is just there that
the claims of evolution become most deeply problematical for theists.
return to text

17. Walter M. Fitch, "The Challenges
to Darwinism Since the Last Centennial and the Impact of Molecular
Studies," Evolution 36 (1982): pp. 1138-39. Emphasis
added. return to text